Gong xi fa cai!

The observance of the New Year (Xin Nian) typically several days, but the New Year season lasts from the middle of the previous years’ final month to the middle of the first month in the new year.

In the system of reckoning time, years are named in cycles of sixty years. The name of the year repeats every sixty years, therefore.

2010 is the 11th year in the 60 year cycle and is called gengyin. It is the year 4707… year of the Tiger.

An upside down ("dao") character – "Spring"

To prepare for the New Year, people give their houses thorough cleaning so as to symbolically sweeping misfortune or bad luck and make room for incoming good fortune that they want to arrive.

Doors and windows are often painted and decorated with paper cutouts depicting happiness, wealth and longevity. Characters on red paper are placed upside down on doors, because the Chinese word for "upside down" – "dao" – is like the word for "arrive", so, if the character for "spring" is put up upside down, that means that ‘spring is arriving". The same for "good fortune" etc.

Gongxi facai!

New Year is a time for family gatherings.

Among the foods that are eaten are jiaozi – a boiled dumpling, literally meaning "sleep together and have sons", the meaning of which is apparent.

Fish is also eaten because the Chinese word for "fish" sounds the same as that for "abundance".

One also eats a seaweed called fat choi, a word sounding "prosperity". Noodles symbolize a long life.

On New Year’s Eve you are to leave all the lights on in your house tonight, by the way. I hear that is very good luck – particularly for the electric company. In the morning children get hong bao which are red envelopes with some money. They will customarily say "Where’s the red envelope?!?" until you cough it up. Therefore, I will put my donation button on this post!

People visit their neighbors to greet each other. You might think about doing that, since that can also be a work of mercy.

People give mandarin oranges as a token of good will and good fortune.

I grudgingly accept your “Happy Chinese New Year” :) Although no fan of the repressive Maos in power, I’m actually very fond of Chinese culture (especially food–I recently had the great ‘fortune’ to be taken to the best Chinese food I’ve ever had by a writer friend of mine in Los Angeles, the place dates to the second World War.)

I’m in Portland, and they have an amazing Chinese Garden here, with native Chinese plants (which you can no longer import.) The Chinese and Japanese have a preternatural ability to create amazing garden spaces. I also love some of their art:

The Lunar New Year is also bringing the local Church a lesson on inculturation.

Since Ash Wednesday this year falls on the fourth day of the Lunar New Year (Feb. 17), the Church of Hong Kong dispensed the faithful from fasting and abstinence that day. However, they are obliged to choose some other suitable forms of penance or perform some works of charity, in keeping with the penitential spirit of the season of Lent.

Taking into account the Lunar New Year festivities, the rite of the giving of ashes in Hong Kong may also be postponed to Feb. 24 (during Mass) or Feb. 26 (during Stations of the Cross).

Not to dampen our Chinese New Year or anything like that, but I would like to call everybody’s attention with a Filipino bishop who said “God is present in other religion and culture so the belief in Feng Shui, Astrology, and praying at Buddhist temples should be perceived as instruments that all draws us closer to God.”

Although today is Gongxi facai, or the Chinese New Year; and I swear a Chinese woman almost ran me over. I don’t know if it’s God or the devil playing meaningful jokes like this on me, but the lady was so sorrowful that I couldn’t get mad at her. I think it’s questionable if women should be allowed to drive at all, but definitely, absolutely no Chinese woman should be licensed to drive….

(btw: my wife is a better driver than I am, so I was kidding about the last part, although it is true an ethnic Chinese woman almost killed me today, inadvertently.)

Thanks for the info, I’ve always wondered about the upside down character. Slightly off-topic, but still on things Chinese: I’ve been having an ailment treated by acupuncture, and it is working. However, a friend of mine was aghast, saying that it is incompatible with Christianity? Is this so, and if so, how?

Happy New Year. I guess we could call it “Chinese New Year”, but then why don’t we start calling the “other” new years Egyptian or Mayan? My folks call it Tet, but I think it’d be best to call it in general lunar new year if anything.

“Slightly off-topic, but still on things Chinese: I’ve been having an ailment treated by acupuncture, and it is working. However, a friend of mine was aghast, saying that it is incompatible with Christianity? Is this so, and if so, how?

Thanks for a splendid site!
Comment by Sean og”

Not to hijack Fr.’s post, but I practice acupuncture so I would be very hard to convince that acupuncture is incompatible with our Holy Faith. Science is discovering more and more the physiologic mechanisms of how this ancient healing technique works.

“The Lunar New Year is also bringing the local Church a lesson on inculturation.

Since Ash Wednesday this year falls on the fourth day of the Lunar New Year (Feb. 17), the Church of Hong Kong dispensed the faithful from fasting and abstinence that day. However, they are obliged to choose some other suitable forms of penance or perform some works of charity, in keeping with the penitential spirit of the season of Lent.”

I don’t see how this is different than giving a dispensation to eat “corned beef and cabbage” when St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday during Lent.

“This blog is like a fusion of the Baroque ‘salon’ with its well-tuned harpsichord around which polite society gathered for entertainment and edification and, on the other hand, a Wild West “saloon” with its out-of-tune piano and swinging doors, where everyone has a gun and something to say. Nevertheless, we try to point our discussions back to what it is to be Catholic in this increasingly difficult age, to love God, and how to get to heaven.” – Fr. Z

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"We as Catholics have not properly combated (the culture) because we have not been taught our Catholic Faith, especially in the depth needed to address these grave evils of our time. This is a failure of catechesis both of children and young people that has been going on for fifty years. It is being addressed, but it needs much more radical attention... What has also contributed greatly to the situation is an exaltation of the virtue of tolerance which is falsely seen as the virtue which governs all other virtues. In other words, we should tolerate other people in their immoral actions to the extent that we seem also to accept the moral wrong. Tolerance is a virtue, but it is certainly not the principal virtue; the principal virtue is charity... Charity means speaking the truth. I have encountered it (not speaking the truth) many times myself as a priest and bishop. It is something we simply need to address. There is far too much silence — people do not want to talk about it because the topic is not 'politically correct.' But we cannot be silent any longer."

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One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.
— C. S. Lewis

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The more vigorously the primacy was displayed, the more the question came up about the extent and and limits of [papal] authority, which of course, as such, had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith. … The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.

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For contemplation…

"Latin is a precise, essential language. It will be abandoned, not because it is unsuitable for the new requirements of progress, but because the new men will not be suitable for it. When the age of demagogues and charlatans begins, a language like Latin will no longer be useful, and any oaf will be able to give a speech in public and talk in such a way that he will not be kicked off the stage. The secret to this will consist in the fact that, by making use of words that are general, elusive, and sound good, he will be able to speak for an hour without saying anything. With Latin, this is impossible."

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“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

A morsel for thought…

"If your work is strong enough for someone to hate you, it's strong enough for someone to love you. The middle is what you should fear."

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For your consideration…

"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

More food for thought:

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Francis Card. George

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“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

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